The importance of nurturing creativity in schools

Here is a link to a talk by Ken Robinson, the creativity expert on how today’s schools are killing creativity in children. Ken Robinson is a visionary and had a key role to play in advising the British system of education on the significance of nurturing creativity in their classrooms.

Here is an excerpt from the talk:

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

In this talk, he argues that nurturing creativity among children is as important as teaching them literacy. Today’s schools were designed to meet the needs of industrialism. The main goal of the K-12 education system as it exists today in many countries around the world is to prepare children for entrance into the university system. Hence subjects like math and science are almost always given more importance than subjects like art, music and so on. As a result, some absolutely brilliant people think that they’re not.

But the face of education is changing. UNESCO predicts that more people will  graduate from colleges worldwide in the next 30 years than the number of people who have graduated since the beginning of history. Suddenly, degrees will not be worth anything. What required a Bachelors may require a Masters or a Ph.D degree. It’s a process of academic inflation. It indicates that the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

The research into how human brain works and learns has uncovered many new things -

• Intelligence is diverse (we think of the world through many different ways  – visually, kinesthetic in abstract terms and so on),
• Intelligence is dynamic (intelligence is wonderfully interactive within the brain  and not compartmentalized. )
• Intelligence is distinct.

It’s time to rethink our fundamental base on  which the whole education system was designed.